Re: lirc license
On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 08:25:34AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 01:41:37AM +0000, Benjamin A'Lee wrote:
> > I was under the impression that the output of a program wasn't covered by the
> > licence of the program (or any licence dictated by the author of the program).
> > Wouldn't that be similar to the output of GCC being automatically covered by the
> > GPL, or am I misunderstanding something (I wouldn't be surprised if I was).
>
> The output of a program may be covered by the license of the
> program. It's one of those fuzzy cases that is difficult to
> predict. To avoid problems, the license of gcc explicitly disclaims
> this, granting you an unlimited license to do anything with its
> output.
In the case of gcc, it wasn't anything fuzzy. IIRC, libgcc is linked
statically into the executable to provide startup code etc. and it used
to be GPL. libgcc (and similar parts of gcc) have license additions to
prevent every executable from being neccessarily GPL licensed.
In short it's not the output of gcc, but the automatically linked libgcc
that created license problems.
--
Andreas Bombe <bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de> GPG key 0x04880A44
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